While in Fiji for a recent Indo-Pacific Security Conference, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN and current USAID Administrator Samantha Power spoke about climate change and tweeted a video of herself playing rugby. She did not mention the threat China poses to the region or any of China’s human rights abuses, including the genocide against its own Muslim population.
Back in 2021, she tweeted a video of herself playing volleyball in Darfur, Sudan. While in Darfur, she never mentioned China’s role in funding the genocide there. Her priorities seem to have changed since she won the Pulitzer Prize for A Problem from Hell, her 2002 book about America’s history of failing to intervene to stop genocide.
The Chinese government is committing a well-documented genocide, and Power knows it. Forced sterilization and forced abortion for the purpose of eradicating an ethnic and religious group meet the legal definition of genocide. Yet since being named USAID administrator, she has not spoken much about it publicly. (I found a single vague reference to it in a speech at the National Press Club in 2022.)
There are more than 1 million Muslims being enslaved, forcibly sterilized, and tortured in concentration camps with a “shoot to kill” policy for attempted escapees. Prisoners range in age from 15 to 73. In women’s camps in Xinjiang, guards use what has been referred to as an “electrified stick,” which is essentially a cattle prod, to repeatedly rape the detainees. One Uyghur woman, who was forced to handcuff prisoners
